Permabit Doubles Archiving Capacity, Lowers Price

In a clear enterprise bid, Permabit has unveiled a new version of its archiving system that more than doubles the vendor's previous capacity, while actually reducing its price per Gbyte of raw disk storage.

Up to now, Permabit has offered archiving systems of up to 40 Tbytes, racked in clusters from four to 20 nodes. Now, the vendor is offering a 96-Tbyte system that can reach 3 Pbytes when up to 32 racks are clustered.

Permabit says its legacy systems, now renamed the Enterprise Archive Business Series, start at $55,000 for 4 Tbytes. The new Data Center Series starts at $75,000 for 10 Tbytes. Taking into consideration the size and pricing of all systems in each series, Permabit says the average cost-per-Gbyte for the Business Series is about $8, while the new Data Center series averages about $5 per Gbyte.

Data reduction brings those costs down to about 33 cents to $2.33 per Gbyte for the Data Center Series, Permabit claims. The vendor compares that with a self-set industry average range of $25 to $75 per Gbyte.

While some of this is clearly math serving marketing with tough-to-prove specifics, at least one source says Permabit's chief claim -- to offer humongous archiving space at lower prices than before -- is solid. "While the industry average may be smaller than Permabit claims, and its savings smaller, the delta is legitimate," says one industry analyst, who asked not to be named.